I have been a scientist in the field of the earth and environmental sciences for 33 years, specializing in geologic disposal of nuclear waste, energy-related research, subsurface transport and environmental clean-up of heavy metals. I consult on strategic planning for the DOE, EPA/State environmental agencies, and industry including companies that own nuclear, hydro, wind farms, large solar arrays, coal and gas plants. I also consult for EPA/State environmental agencies and industry on clean-up of heavy metals from soil and water. For over 20 years I have been a member of Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the NRDC, the Environmental Defense Fund and many others, as well as professional societies including the America Nuclear Society, the American Chemical Society and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

Fear Of Radiation -- It's All In The Noise

Much of the discussion on fear of radiation misses the essential point of noise in the data. This is more important than it sounds. The best discussion of noise may come from an economist, probably because that field has so much noise in it – just look at the debt ceiling debate.

The famous economist Fischer Black considered noise to be the opposite of information. He did not just consider it to be inaccurate or corrupt data, or irrelevant background information, or data from random sources, he considered more nefarious human and societal sources like hype and intentional disinformation.

The recent astounding decision by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (Radiation Not A Big Deal) can only be interpreted if one understands noise. UNSCEAR’s report confessed that low doses of radiation should not be used to predict cancers in future populations, contrary to what everyone’s been doing for the last 60 years.

The report, along with many new findings (No DNA Damage at 400x Background), supports the observation that radiation doses less than about 10 rem (0.1 Sv) have no observable effects on human health and the environment. Less than 10 rem (0.1 Sv) is the region that encompasses annual background levels around the world.

Another way of saying this is “below 10 rem/yr (0.1 Sv/yr), the effects of radiation disappear in the noise.”

It’s like trying to hear Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon from across the room while operating a buzz saw without hearing protection. And then trying to say it’s the music that caused some of your hearing loss.

Solid Cancers per 100,000 population in the Japanese Atomic Bomb Survivor Cohort of 79,901 subjects (data from ICRP).

The classic example of this problem is interpreting the increase in cancer rates of the Japanese Atomic Bomb Survivors (see figure). This figure graphs the cancer occurrences in the survivors using data from the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP 1994). It is clear that high doses of radiation cause an increase in cancer. At low doses, there is no clear increase.

The straight-line portion of these types of curves above Earth background has been the basis for the Linear No-Threshold Dose hypothesis, or LNT. First put forward after WWII, LNT is a supposition that harmful radiation effects follow a linear relationship – increase the dose, increase the risk, increase the cancers, increase the deaths.

The part of this line above 10 rem (0.1 Sv) certainly supports this idea, although doubling the dose does not double the effect like is commonly thought. Doses between 50 and 100 rem (0.5 and 1 Sv) resulted in a 29% increase in cancers over doses between 0.5 and 10 rem (0.005 and 0.1 Sv) even though there was a 1000% increase in dose.

However, below 10 rem (0.1 Sv), the effects disappear completely in the noise – the noise of all the other environmental and genetic effects that cause death. In the 1950s, to be simplistic and conservative, the world governing bodies decided to just draw in that line anyway, all the way down to zero, dictating that there was no threshold.

That seemed easy at the time. Who could imagine what problems it would cause in the future? But notice, that extra tail of a line crosses the entire range of background radiation on Earth, what is considered normal, what humans and every other life form has lived with long before we split the atom.

What that extra tail of a line inadvertently established as policy, though, was that all radiation was dangerous, no matter what kind, for what purpose, or at what dose. Suddenly, just walking outside was dangerous, technically. But not really. No one paid much attention then because there wasn’t much application of nuclear anyway in the ‘40s and ‘50s, except bombs.

However, as this idea slowly crept into regulations, laws, response plans, the medical industry and the Cold War, it grew into a multi-headed Hydra. Legally, we had to care about this. We had to spend billions protecting against what was once background levels. Now anyone can calculate the risk to everyone else, even those who won’t be born for a thousand years. And we have to care about it.

It’s right out of a Road Warrior movie. No wonder the fear of radiation took over the worldview. Science fiction is much more fun to study than real science.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Take Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for example. According to the Washington Post (WP Secretary Clinton), Secretary Clinton has spent over 2,000 hours on a plane above 25,000 ft during her tenure as Secretary of State. Because radiation dose increases with altitude, she received an additional 1,740 mrem of high-energy radiation, an astoundingly dangerous dose when viewed through the lens of LNT. Of course, it’s trivial and no one cares about it at all. Indeed, the physical stress of that much travel is actually dangerous to your health, not the rad.

But the radiation risk is calculable in a science fiction sort of way. The same way we calculate the risk of an additional 50 mrem to virtual people in five hundred years from various nuclear waste disposal strategies (Environmental Impact Statement DOE/EIS-0391 as an example). We’ve decided that, in an overall 300 mrem background, reducing this risk by lowering the dose from 50 mrem to something like 10 mrem, is worth, say, spending an additional $100 billion.

Is the risk from 50 mrem worth this? The same risk as moving from Los Angeles to Colorado? Do we generally spend $1 billion to save a life in this country? Could it be better spent on real health care, now? Immunizations? Tackling epidemics? Addressing childhood obesity? Paying down the debt? Outlawing airplane trips? Are virtual people in the future facing a trivial risk more worthy of our help than U.S. citizens now?

This is a societal decision that society has been left out of. That needs to change.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

There is nothing in that document which represents a major shift. You have confused collective dose with LNT. Page 11, para 2.30 starts out:

“Neglecting uncertainties in estimating doses not only results in underestimating the uncertainty of the risk estimates, but may also lead to an underestimate of the risk itself.”

They are not changing their mind about LNT at all, just pointing out the uncertainties when doing risk estimates. A risk estimate can under or overestimate the true risk. That isn’t new at all. As far as the usefulness and problems associated with collective dose, that has also been well-documented for over a decade:

You can’t even provide any statement by any of these authorities that “LNT has been the consensus of those bodies for over 50 years.”

There’s nothing in UNSCEAR 2008 that makes that statement.

Why do you put so much faith in these agencies? You act like they speak for all scientists. They don’t. You know members are appointed or are invited to serve on these committees, don’t you? Do you think they invite scientists to serve on these committees that oppose their views? Do you think these inbred committee members are objective about considering research evidence that does not support their own recommendations?

Look up the first BEIR report, the first UNSCEAR report, the first NCRP report, and follow them through today. They all support LNT, they don’t make a statement the “it’s been the consensus for over 50 years.”

But it has been the consensus.

I look at the last 400 years since we started doing consensus science compared to the 2,000,000 years before that. The pace of knowledge and technology has been phenomenal.

That’s why I put so much faith in them….because the evidence is all around us that science works.

There are scientists who question evolution, global warming, heliocentrism, etc. There are scientists who break the law, some believe zombies, etc.

None of that matters.

Society has agreed to form consensus groups to summarize the state of the science. Anyone is free to publish a paper to overturn the consensus (that’s what makes great scientists famous like Darwin and Einstein).

The evidence is all around us regarding the benefits of science, not LNT. It takes a lot of expertise to understand the theory, which is why we want the experts forming a consensus…not business magazine bloggers and commenters.

It’s like a jury in jurisprudence…not everyone sits on a jury, there is an agreed-to, fair selection process. Likewise, not every scientist is free to sit on every consensus body. But the selection process is fair.

The bodies usually don’t recommend policy (though they do on occasion), they review the published literature by ALL the experts (everyone has a voice) and they summarize our knowledge base. Before publishing their findings, they circulate a draft copy for comment to other experts for input. And then they publish their results.

If you have evidence to overturn the consensus, you should publish it in peer reviewed literature.